Mobile developers hoping to cash in on a blockbuster app have bad news from researcher Gartner: More competition and higher demands from users will make it even more difficult for developers to make money from smartphone and tablet applications.

The Google Play app store and Apple's iTunes store both have over one million apps. That adds up to too many choices for users, and makes it harder for developers to get noticed or make money from their applications.

Average apps stats

Today about 90 percent of paid applications are downloaded fewer than 500 times per day and make less than $1250 a day, according to Gartner. This is only going to get worse, thanks to greater competition. In addition, applications will have to become more sophisticated to keep up with user demands, so operations, development, testing, deployment and support will become more expensive, it said.

This means by 2018 only one in ten thousand consumer apps will be considered a financial success by their developers, according to the market research company.